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Democratization is a major political phenomenon of the age and has been the focus of a burgeoning political science literature. This book considers democratization across a range of disciplines, from anthropology and economics, to sociology, law and area studies. The construction of democratization as a unit of study reflects the intellectual standpoint of the inquirer. The book highlights the use of normative argument to legitimize the exercise of power. From the 1950s to the 1980s, economic success enabled the authoritarian governments of South Korea and Taiwan to achieve a large measure of popular support despite the absence of democracy. The book outlines what a feminist framework might be and analyses feminist engagements with the theory and practice of democratization. It also shows how historians have contributed to the understanding of the processes of democratization. International Political Economy (IPE) has always had the potential to cut across the levels-of-analysis distinction. A legal perspective on democratization is presented by focusing on a tightly linked set of issues straddling the border between political and judicial power as they have arisen. Classic and contemporary sociological approaches to understanding democracy and democratization are highlighted, with particular attention being accorded to the post-1989 period. The book displays particularities within a common concern for institutional structures and their performance, ranging over the representation of women, electoral systems and constitutions (in Africa) and presidentialism (in Latin America). Both Europe and North America present in their different ways a kind of bridge between domestic and international dimensions of democratization.
than with the effect they might have on the individuals that constitute society in terms of promoting or inhibiting social equality and better life chances, and vice versa. In this chapter, classic and contemporary sociological approaches to understanding democracy and democratization are highlighted, with particular attention being accorded to the post-1989 period. Classical sociological perspectives on democratization Given the central concerns of the sociologist towards democratization, it is inevitable that key practical issues that have concerned sociologists
Over more than thirty years of reform and opening, the Chinese Communist Party has pursued the gradual marketization of China’s economy alongside the preservation of a resiliently authoritarian political system, defying long-standing predictions that ‘transition’ to a market economy would catalyse deeper political transformation. In an era of deepening synergy between authoritarian politics and finance capitalism, Communists constructing capitalism offers a novel and important perspective on this central dilemma of contemporary Chinese development. This book challenges existing state–market paradigms of political economy and reveals the Eurocentric assumptions of liberal scepticism towards Chinese authoritarian resilience. It works with an alternative conceptual vocabulary for analysing the political economy of financial development as both the management and exploitation of socio-economic uncertainty. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and over sixty interviews with policymakers, bankers, and former party and state officials, the book delves into the role of China’s state-owned banking system since 1989. It shows how political control over capital has been central to China’s experience of capitalist development, enabling both rapid economic growth whilst preserving macroeconomic and political stability. Communists constructing capitalism will be of academic interest to scholars and graduate students in the fields of Chinese studies, social studies of finance, and international and comparative political economy. Beyond academia, it will be essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of Chinese capitalism and its implications for an increasingly central issue in contemporary global politics: the financial foundations of illiberal capitalism.
remained among some members. Among the most vocal was Vic Flick, a renowned session guitarist, who wrote extensively at the time and later in his autobiography (2008) about the perceived misappropriation by the Union of funds to which a sizeable number of session and orchestral musicians believed they were entitled. Although the Union did its best to allocate the funds from the post-1989 period fairly, Flick claimed that ‘there is Covering 12.5 per cent of PPL’s income for 1989–92. The MU was to continue to distribute PPL monies on behalf of non-featured performers
and even rioting officially recorded every year (Lum 2006). The issues range from environmental concerns to employment insecurity but an important thread is high-handed or corrupt officialdom.2 In addition to the streets, protest can be found in factories, house churches and, despite attempts to control it, in cyberspace. The key to the response to protest lies in its scale, leadership and intent. So far, according to Brady, the Party’s tactics are succeeding: In the post-1989 period, there have been many demonstrations in rural and urban areas over various local
post-1989 period have dealt directly with media content or examined themes and patterns of reporting across different conflicts. Where a comparative approach has been taken, attention has largely centred on other issues, such as: the place of recent conflicts in the history of war correspondence (Carruthers 2000 ; McLaughlin 2002 ); the relationships between the media and non-governmental organisations
Salvation Front, headed by an ex-communist Ion Iliescu, sought to control the near anarchic situation and stamp its authority over revolutionary excesses. As Kevin Adamson and Sergiu Florean discuss in their chapter, one of the Front’s prime goals in the days and weeks that followed was to construct a usable discursive version of the ‘revolution’ to legitimise its assumption of power. It is to the post-1989 period that we shall now turn. Outcomes With the revolutions of 1989 Eastern Europe, and indeed the world, marched bravely and expectantly into a new era. The hopes
the Fourteenth Central Committee, before being adopted officially in 1995 at the fifth plenum (Lin 2008). This programme built up the capital of large SOEs at the expense of those loss-making SOEs that were privatized (Institute for Industrial Economics 1998). The premise of these strategies for reform of SOEs was not to seek to improve enterprise efficiency, but rather to strengthen them as pillars of China’s national industrial capacity. The legacy of this line of thought that took shape in the post-1989 period has been clearly discernible in the evolution of